On Mayr

Evolgen has a has a nice little post poking fun at the late Ernst Mayr. A few comments. 1) R.A. Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane and J.M. Smith were trained as mathematical/physical scientists before their biological days. Fisher did work in statistical mechanics before he went off to Rothamsted. Physical scientists can and do say stupid things about biology, but that is only when they aren't biologists. 2) I think what Mayr was getting at was denigrating "bean baggery" and "reductionism." Theoretical population geneticists break down complex evolutionary dynamics to analytically tractable parameters (Mayr flourished before in silico). Mayr was trained as an ornithologist with a naturalistic bent, and so the modelers were aliens to him. Will Provine has argued that some of the opinions of Mayr regarding theoretical evolutionary genetics in the 1950s were founded in large part on ignorance, and later on he appreciated the nuances of Sewall Wright's ideas ...